My first patent, which I filed during my time in IBM over the summer of 2005, is now available via Google patent search. It’s pretty dry, but that’s the nature of these things. 
patents
Entries tagged with “patents”.
Recent bookmarks tagged with “patents”.
- Dan Shapiro » How to read a patent in 60 seconds
- Quite the firestorm : On a New Road
In Sun's early history, we didn't think much of patents. While there's a kernel of good sense in the reasoning for patents, the system itself has gotten goofy. Sun didn't file many patents initially. But then we got sued by IBM for violating the "RISC patent" - a patent that essentially said "if you make something simpler, it'll go faster". Seemed like a blindingly obvious notion that shouldn't have been patentable, but we got sued, and lost.
Money was, of course, also an issue between Sun and Google. They were partly planning on revenue from advertising, but mostly they wanted to disrupt Apple's trajectory, and Apple's expected entry into advertising. If mobile devices take over as the computing platform for consumers, then Google's advertising channel, and the heart of its revenue, gets gutted. It doesn't take much of a crystal ball to see where Apple is going, and it's not a pretty picture for Google or anyone else.- FutureTap » PatentGate — Apple responded, resolved amicably
- espacenet — Bibliographic data
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A method and system for creating human robots with psychic abilities, as well as enabling a human robot to access information in a time machine to predict the future accurately and realistically. The present invention provides a robot with the ability to accomplish tasks quickly and accurately without using any time. This permits a robot to cure cancer, fight a war, write software, read a book, learn to drive a car, draw a picture or solve a complex math problem in less than one second.- Jobs Responds to Google's WebM Video Standard Announcement as Patent Questions Begin to Surface - Mac Rumors
Jobs reportedly simply responded by sending a link to a lengthy and technical blog post from an independent developer working on an open source x264 project for encoding video in the H.264 format preferred by Apple. In short, developer Jason Garrett-Glaser calls VP8/WebM "a mess" and "not ready for primetime", with Google even having declared the standard "final" despite a number of flaws already discovered in it. In addition, while appearing to be a significant upgrade over the Theora format previously preferred by Mozilla and Opera, the new format on the whole does not seem to be any better than H.264.
- Know Your Rights: H.264, patent licensing, and you -- Engadget
There's a crucial difference between "open" and "free" here. Although H.264 is an open standard, in that it was developed by a consortium of companies and anyone can make and sell an encoder or decoder, it's not free -- you've got to pay for a royalty fee to use it, and the rates are set by the MPEG-LA, which collects payments and distributes them to its members. The basic rate sheet and license terms are publicly available in summary form (PDF) on the MPEG-LA's website -- it's certainly possible for companies to strike custom deals, but for our purposes the public document offers a good baseline.
- Electric power cord retrieving device for vacuum cleaner - Patent 6502778
- Abstruse Goose » The Smartest Man in Babylon
- New Amazon patent: sending video of orders being boxed
- Abstruse Goose » The Smartest Man in Babylon
The online retail giant received a U.S. patent today for a method of sending images and video clips to customers of their order being packaged for shipment — to reassure them that everything is correct. That kind of feature would put a new multi-media spin on the standard e-mail order notification.
- How to Take Notes like Thomas Edison - Stepcase Lifehack
Edison certainly subscribed to the philosophy that if life is worth living, it is worth writing about. At five million pages, he was at the extreme end of this. He did live a long, prosperous life. And he lived it quite fully since he always seemed to have something to write about.
- Smartphone Motion Control Patent: Who Owns It? | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD
Here’s a potentially noteworthy development in the patent litigation-riddled mobile device market. Last week, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a very broad patent on motion-based smartphone control, one that could have significant implications for the industry.
The patent is #7,679,604, “Method and apparatus for controlling a computer system,” and it describes motion control as a means of interacting with smartphones and the like.- Smartphone Mystery Patent Authors Work for Google and Apple | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD
But I have uncovered a bit more about the inventors who wrote it. The first, as I mentioned earlier, is an engineering director at Google (GOOG). And the second?
He’s a hardware engineering manager at Apple (AAPL), working on the iPad.- Daring Fireball: On Submarine Patents vis-à-vis H.264 and Ogg Theora
- Daring Fireball: GIF, H.264, and Patents
If some patent troll decides H.264 violates a patent, they must go to court with MPEG LA, not individual licensees. If a patent troll decides Ogg Theora violates a patent, they might sue those who are using it. I bring this up not to say browsers should not support Ogg Theora — I’m just saying Ogg is a lot closer to being in GIF’s boat than H.264 is.
- Apple vs HTC: a patent breakdown -- Engadget
Some of these patents are from 15 years ago and cover OS-level behavior, so it's hard to see how they can relate only to HTC's implementation of Android and not Google's OS as a whole. Yeah, it's wild, and while we're not going to blow out all 20 patents to sort out what they mean -- not yet, anyway -- we can certainly walk through the claims. Let's see what we've got.
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